The multifaceted music of German-Venezuelan musician Niobe (Yvonne Cornelius), with its collage-like interplay of elements, can be likened to the bric-a-brac boxes of artist Joseph Cornell--an intimate and personal art that combines the formal rigidity of modernism with the playful spirit of Surrealism. Where Cornell and others relied on found objects and visual collage for their art, Cornelius uses modern music tools such as samplers to wrest languorous, dreamlike states from a variety of acoustic instruments and styles from variety of musical eras. Her fifth full-length, BLACKBIRD’S ECHO, again features a splintering of musical motifs, from blues riffs to electronic abstractions to jazz-like phrasings, all held together by Cornelius’s singular vocal talents, which, through the idiosyncrasies of her German-to-English translation, become yet another abstract instrumental layer in and of itself.